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by brucethemoose2 1155 days ago
They technically have some useful IP. POWER in particular is like a more fleshed out RISC-V, and they could totally rework the memory/interconnet heavy mainframes to take advantage of the AI boom.

They just... don't.

1 comments

I wonder what's the competitive advantage of POWER in terms of cost/performance compared with x86

(And sure they have their mainframes, but POWER seems to be the 'middle of the road' solution from them - at least in cost)

Or it's mostly about "this IBM solution only runs under Linux or AIX in POWER6)

Their biggest chips are, SMT, memory and interconnect heavy. Seems like they would be quite competitive in memory-bound database loads.

But the big thing with POWER is that its open source. Generally, whatever virtues apply to RISC-V apply to POWER as well.